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In part one of our "SSD Revolution" series, we covered the basics of flash memory in solid state drives, walking through lots of important but esoteric details such as the difference between NAND flash and NOR, or how SSD reads and writes work. We also talked about the techniques used to make SSDs faster and to prolong their lives. But SSDs don't just exist in a vacuum—the state of solid state, such as it is, has had a significant effect on the shape of the modern mobile device landscape, which we explore now in part two.

SSD Revolution

Not long ago, flash-based MP3 players occupied the low end of the capacity spectrum and, while some brave souls were using PCMCIA compact flash cards in their laptops, you still needed a real hard disk drive to effectively boot and use Windows or OS X. Not anymore—not only are flash-powered, high-capacity MP3 players and laptops standard, but modern operating systems are quickly adapting to SSDs as the norm.

An entire class of ultrabooks—which, in spite of what the name suggests, do not contain hyperdrives, organic CPUs based on alien DNA, or anything else truly deserving of the "ultra" prefix—are now built around the MacBook Air's design philosophy of being durable, thin, light... and stuffed full of NAND flash. Laptops of this form factor seem poised to deliver on most of the promises that netbooks once made (especially portability and battery life) without falling prey to the same set of compromises that ultimately doomed netbooks to hobbyist devices.

Tablets, too, are on the rise. The tablet segment of the mobile device market didn't even meaningfully exist prior to 2010—say what you will about the iPad, but it truly sparked a revolution. Since their rise to prominence, all mainstream tablets have been exclusively flash-powered devices; there's not a hard disk to be found anywhere in the lot. While the SSD craze might be sweeping the "real" computer segment as flash storage becomes more common on desktops and laptops, the place where NAND flash most truly empowers consumers is in mobile devices.

But things were not always thus, and flash wasn't always the best choice for mobile devices to store data.

CmdrTaco's gaffe

Tough crowd

One of the most-parodied comments in the history of the Internet appeared on October 23, 2001 on tech blog and aggregator site Slashdot. Apple had just announced something called an iPod, with which they it hoped to take on the already-crowded portable music player market. In the news post about the iPod launch, Slashdot editor and founder Rob Malda (known by his net handle CmdrTaco) famously wrote, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

At the time, he had a point. That initial iPod contained a 1.8" hard disk drive (the discontinued MK5002MAL) manufactured by Toshiba, which provided 5GB of space to store music (or anything else, really, since the iPod's FireWire connection meant it could be used as a fast and relatively cheap external hard disk drive). Though CmdrTaco was certainly correct that the competing Creative NOMAD Jukebox had more usable capacity, he swung and missed on which player would win the market because he made the common geek mistake of believing that a device's laundry list of features will tell the story of its success. Even though it had less space and didn't do wireless syncing (a feature that wouldn't show up on iOS devices until 2012!), the iPod was a heck of a lot easier to put in your pocket.

A look through the comments attached to that old Slashdot story paints a scene utterly foreign to most folks today. Yes, flash-based portable music players existed back in 2001, a time so long ago that a big chunk of today's hipster digerati were still in junior high, but those flash-based players had capacities measured in the dozens, or at best hundreds, of megabytes. A 64MB music player couldn't carry around much more than a CD or two of songs; the biggest 256MB players weren't that much of an improvement. Flash just wasn't ready for such uses, and if you wanted to take a substantial chunk of your music collection around with you, you needed a player with a hard disk drive.

I've said more than once that hard disk drives are miraculous machines, manufactured to incredibly tight tolerances and requiring extreme precision. Putting a spinning hard disk drive into a portable device which is going to bounce around clipped to your hip while jogging, therefore, is just about the worst possible thing you could do to the drive. Hard disks work best and most reliably when they're placed flat and don't move, since even tiny vibrations can bounce the drive heads around as they sit suspended on an air cushion just a few nanometers above the spinning platters, trying to focus on data tracks that are themselves only a few nanometers wide. The hard drives used in portable devices had to be treated carefully and used in very specific ways.

A Creative NOMAD Jukebox, in all of its weird sort-of-CD-player-shaped chunkiness

Wikimedia Commons

That first-gen iPod, for example, didn't keep its drive spinning constantly like a desktop or laptop computer does. In addition to saving on battery power, keeping the drive spun down when not needed kept the heads safely parked in their landing zones rather than hovering over the data surface of the disk, into which they might crash if sufficiently jarred. When music was played, the drive would quickly spin up, read as much of the current song and the next song into the iPod's RAM as it could, and then spin down again. Assuming you were listening to a playlist and not rapidly clicking through your library, the disk spent most of its time spun down and the iPod just played data out of RAM.

Flash-based players don't require such an approach. Flash media is solid state, so it doesn't have a motor; it also doesn't particularly care whether or not it's being vibrated to death. It's entirely possible to take a hard disk player like an iPod Classic or a Creative Nomad and cause them to freak out by shaking them vigorously while changing tracks; flash doesn't care. If only it could be produced with higher capacities...

Moore's Law marches on

Times change, progress happens, and every couple of years or so the amount of transistors you can cram into a given amount of space tends to double. Hard disks fit the bill for portable devices for quite some time after the portable music player market began to explode, with 1.8" disks giving way to even smaller "microdrives" (Toshiba's 2004 press release about its 0.85" hard disk makes for a fun read, predicting that the drive will soon be used in "handhelds and smart phones"—which was true, though not for very long). Even as late as 2005, it seemed certain that the smart phones of the future would be powered by a teeny-tiny little hard disk drives, with Samsung and others proceeding full steam ahead with production plans.

Teeny-tiny little hard disk drives are amazing in their own right, but in the last half of the 00s (the Aughties? Is that what we're supposed to call them?), their capacity and their speed was surpassed by solid state. Flash has always been a better choice for portable devices because of its lower power consumption and insensitivity to vibration; so as flash capacity ramped up, hard drives for portable devices lost their one remaining advantage. Any future that microdrives had in the mobile space was quickly stomped flat by the 2007 release of the first-generation iPhone, which used 4 and 8 GB of NAND flash as its medium of choice for storing music, pictures, videos, and later apps and ringtones. Within a year, every other smartphone manufacturer in the world began to release something that looked, sounded, and smelled like an iPhone; designers abandoned all thoughts of using anything other than NAND flash.

It became like a closed feedback loop: as more manufacturers demanded to use flash in their devices, more flash needed to be produced; as more flash needed to be produced, it became worthwhile to accelerate research and development efforts in order to figure out how to make it better and cheaper, so more could be sold. From 2007 on, the mobile device market skewed exclusively in the direction of flash.

These days, portable devices with 32 or 64 GB of flash can be found everywhere. Tablets like the iPad are powering their way into homes and businesses, and solid state disks in laptops are becoming as common as spinning hard disk drives. Ultrabooks, driven by the sales success of the 2010 and 2011-generation MacBooks Air, all have flash in some form or another; some have hybrid disks, others are SSD-only.

It's certainly safe at this point to say that flash has won the war in the mobile space—I don't think we'll ever see another tablet or phone based on anything other than solid state storage. The war for the proverbial desktop (which includes most laptops) is far from over, with hard disk drives still outnumbering SSDs in most traditional computers. Still, SSDs are in enough places doing enough things that modern operating systems have changed to accommodate them.

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Lee Hutchinson
Lee is the Senior Technology Editor at Ars and oversees gadget, automotive, IT, and gaming/culture content. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and human space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX. Emaillee.hutchinson@arstechnica.com

103 Reader Comments

While an OK read... I'm not sure how this article is any different from the "wow... I can't believe you can get 2TB in a single HDD" comments... technology advances, when the price point is right, things adapt/adopt. But, I guess... that's just common geek knowledge and adoption of technology... like the common use of MP3s and MP3 players years before 2001.

"SRT allows a computer to use a normal hard disk drive as its main storage device, but adds the ability to then use a smaller SSD (up to 64GB in size) as a much faster read and write cache."

I have a hybrid drive with a small (4Gb) SSD portion, which made a big difference, but when it comes to a larger SSD, wouldn't you be better off just configuring two separate drives? One SSD with the operating system and key applications and data, plus a conventional hard drive with data and applications that are used less often or less time-critical?

I tried an SSD a couple years ago and had nothing but trouble with it. After seeing the tech mature considerably, I just tried again with a 120GB Vertex 3 and it has been nothing but happytown. Ubuntu boots to login in what might be 5 seconds, and that's on an i3 notebook. I've never needed high-capacity storage on a notebook, so I was just holding out for a stable 100GB+ SSD that sold for under $1/GB. I managed to find the Vertex 3 for $89, so it was good all around.

While an OK read... I'm not sure how this article is any different from the "wow... I can't believe you can get 2TB in a single HDD" comments... technology advances, when the price point is right, things adapt/adopt. But, I guess... that's just common geek knowledge and adoption of technology... like the common use of MP3s and MP3 players years before 2001.

Yes. Eventually solid state storage caught up with spinny disk for use in MP3 players. If you are only interested in MP3 files or otherwise have meagre needs, solid state storage is fine in a PMP. Otherwise, you're going to be seeking out something with a spinny disk or hope that "the cloud" can make up for what you can't store locally.

Given a choice, the device that can hold 60 episodes of Phineas and Ferb and the entire Disney catalog will win out.

I have a hybrid drive with a small (4Gb) SSD portion, which made a big difference, but when it comes to a larger SSD, wouldn't you be better off just configuring two separate drives? One SSD with the operating system and key applications and data, plus a conventional hard drive with data and applications that are used less often or less time-critical?

Possibly, but maybe not--it becomes a question of the value of your time, since having a pair of disks means sometimes overriding default application install settings, or fiddling with where your home directory lives (or, worse, fiddling with where PARTS of your home directory live). Geeky folks will likely do this without question, but buying a prebuilt PC with SRT means that non-geeks can get many of the benefits without the hassle.

I'd add one thing to your section on technologies that use SSDs as caches for slower rotational media. With ZFS, you can dedicate drives to use to store the file system's log (in ZFS, refered to as the ZIL-- ZFS Intent Log). If an SSD is used for the ZIL, you'll gain many of the benefits of using an SSD for writes to the ZFS file system. On the read side, you can specify an SSD to use for an L2ARC ("Level 2 Adaptive Read Cache"). ZFS caches frequently accessed files in RAM, using the ARC. When the ARC gets full, ZFS supports using another device to handle "overflow"-- hence the "Level 2" bit of L2ARC. In the "Other Hardware" forum, the thread on ZFS talks a bit about using SSDs to speed up ZFS based NAS boxes.

Just a personal note about SSDs: This weekend, I decided to upgrade my old Lenovo x61t tablet in anticipation of the release of Windows 8, and got a 90GB SSD (along with 4GB of RAM) from my local Fry's. After installing the SSD and memory, I installed the Release Preview of Win8. From the word GO (hitting the power button), Win8 boots to the login screen in less than 10 seconds, and I'm at the Start Screen in another three. In using the machine, there doesn't seem to be any more than a few second wait for programs to load. It's like using a whole new machine.

The SSD set me back $95 up front, $65 with MIR. It seems that just in the past few weeks, the price of SSDs have broken through the $1/GB barrier, and keep rocketing down in price. This is definitely good to see. Today I noticed Newegg has a Crucial M4 512GB SSD on sale for something like $350, and it's been available at amazon earlier for $315... At this rate it won't be long before we're through the $.50/GB barrier.

Both of the Flickr photos on the first page are being used in violation of their noncommercial CC licenses. I know it's standard blogger practice to fill out your article with random Google Image Search results, but I thought Ars was above that.

Today I noticed Newegg has a Crucial M4 512GB SSD on sale for something like $350, and it's been available at amazon earlier for $315... At this rate it won't be long before we're through the $.50/GB barrier.

Wow. It was $399 not more than two weeks ago. That's pretty insane considering it was something like $699 a year ago.

I am actually considering getting one to replace my OCZ Agility 2 120GB... which I bought for $220 or so a year ago.

EDIT: That Nomad Jukebox brought back some memories! I never owned one, but I did have a Diamond Rio 500, which was SO COOL!

Laptops of this form factor seem poised to deliver on most of the promises that netbooks once made (especially portability and battery life) without falling prey to the same set of compromises that ultimately doomed netbooks to hobbyist devices.

Meh, netbooks were never meant to be much more than web and media "terminals". The tech press misinterpreted them as a alternative to ultraportable laptops aimed at road warriors, and the confusion continues to this day.

Both of the Flickr photos on the first page are being used in violation of their noncommercial CC licenses. I know it's standard blogger practice to fill out your article with random Google Image Search results, but I thought Ars was above that.

We have been advised by our lawyers, along with many other publications, that "editorial use" is separate and distinct from "commercial use," and that we are, in fact, using such images properly. Ars Technica is a journalistic entity, accredited, and recognized. This is Conde Nast policy, and I didn't make it, and I don't know the full argument behind it, either. I respect any and all who disagree with it, of course, but I trust the 23rd floor of 4 Times Square.

Update: I should have also pointed out that we will remove/change the photos anytime a creator contacts us, regardless of licensing.

I really appreciate these articles. Before reading the last couple edutainment pieces I had very little usable knowledge of SSDs outside of "They make stuff go faster and cost more and are probably less reliable...because I don't know anything about them". This article made sense and was a very entertaining read. Excited to see how these drives effect the future of home computing

Gah, on top of the netbook backhand the opening page holds a "everything changed with iphone".

Seriously, other phones where pushing the dedicated DAPs out of the market (unless you specifically had a audiophile bent) and driving the sale of flash storage (tho for the most part in the shape of addon cards to keep the device cost down). Hell, i am not really sure i like the trend of no card and a bunch of internal NAND. I kinda like the idea of being able to pop the storage out (like i can pull the drive from a laptop or desktop) in case something happens with the device.

"Not long ago, ..., you still needed a real hard disk drive to effectively boot and use Windows or OS X."

WTF are you talking about? I can't comment on WIndows, but Apple (MacOS and OSX) has had the ability to boot from external storage for what, twenty years or so, certainly for longer than flash storage has existed. Which means that there was nothing stopping OSX from booting from a USB thumb drive the moment one large enough existed.

Your point regarding the ubiquity of flash in mobile is true, if obvious, but there's no need to make blatantly silly statements along the way.

I waffled for a while about going to SSD in my laptop, but pulled the trigger after the first article in this series. I'm running a Thinkpad T410 with a Crucial M4 128GB. Even though the controller is only SATA II capable, I can sum up the performance improvement in five words:

Gah, on top of the netbook backhand the opening page holds a "everything changed with iphone".

Because it did. Doesn't matter that it wasn't first--it was the one that actually made non-nerds want smartphones, and as Apple went, so went the industry.

hobgoblin wrote:

Meh, netbooks were never meant to be much more than web and media "terminals". The tech press misinterpreted them as a alternative to ultraportable laptops aimed at road warriors, and the confusion continues to this day.

Market perception drives market adoption. Netbooks failed because they didn't do anything particularly well--or, rather, they didn't do anything particularly well that road warriors or average consumers cared about. Good for you if you have one and use it, but that makes you pretty far outside the casual user envelope.

I knew that putting so much Apple-centric stuff into this piece was going to draw flak, but it's unavoidable. If you're going to talk about ultrabooks--and the elephant in the room is that ultrabooks are an entire class of machines dedicated to aping the Macbook Air in everything but name--or if you're going to talk about the ubiquity of flash in mobile storage, you have to mention Apple. It doesn't at all matter that they didn't make the first tablet or the first smartphone--what matters is that they made the best tablet and smartphone, by any metric that matters. Even if the iPhone and iPad have been surpassed, it doesn't alter their importance.

You don't have to like Apple or Apple products, but denying their influence is like denying climate change or a spherical earth.

Question about whole-disk encryption like BitLocker - does using that mean that if I lose or somehow mis-record my password, I will forever lose access to ALL of my personal data, including external backups? How is that an okay scenario for anybody? I'd much rather have my data be stored in the clear on the drive without that massive risk of messing up and losing access and just deal with the fact that if someone physically breaks into my house that they will be able to get my files if they take my hard drive. Also, isn't ANY performance hit not really worth it? Why bother encrypting things like Program Files, system32, or 90% of your data such as music and vacation pictures? Just put those few MBs of files you're concerned about in a TrueCrypt container or something.

I tried an SSD a couple years ago and had nothing but trouble with it. After seeing the tech mature considerably, I just tried again with a 120GB Vertex 3 and it has been nothing but happytown. Ubuntu boots to login in what might be 5 seconds, and that's on an i3 notebook. I've never needed high-capacity storage on a notebook, so I was just holding out for a stable 100GB+ SSD that sold for under $1/GB. I managed to find the Vertex 3 for $89, so it was good all around.

Yeah my Kingston 96G SSD just died on me last week after 10 months use. I have another machine running a Corsair SSD and I had to turn hibernation off because it would BSOD. So far I'm not problem-free using the new technology...

The best non-Apple SSD to put in a Mac is currently anything based on Samsung's PM830 controller, per Anandtech. I'm not really a fan of the Sandforce drives, they've had issues before (mostly because they don't have the validation resources someone like Intel or Samsung would have).

Currently a 256GB Samsung 830 SSD is going for a little over $1/GB (tiger direct had a sale a few weeks ago at $200, but the price has gone up since then). I bought an Intel 520 128GB drive in May 2011 for $300+ and am a bit jealous of those who waited another 12 months. I'm likely to get the 256GB drive soon, and put the 128GB one in a new Mac Mini, whenever they show up.

I can also very much recommend the Crucial m4 to anyone considering making the jump. At $125 for the 128 GB currently it's a complete steal - I paid $198 for the same capacity just six months ago (wishing I had waited now). For $210 I would probably just get the 256 GB, probably enough space for your OS and programs and even some games. Booting Windows in 3 seconds - really doesn't get much better than that.

It doesn't at all matter that they didn't make the first tablet or the first smartphone--what matters is that they made the best tablet and smartphone, by any metric that matters. Even if the iPhone and iPad have been surpassed, it doesn't alter their importance.

You don't have to like Apple or Apple products, but denying their influence is like denying climate change or a spherical earth.

Thank you.

Apple popularized certain technologies for the broader non-technical market such as SSDs. The common dislike for Apple in Internet discussions should not eliminate that historical information.

This is a low point for Ars, even with the kinds of responses that show up around DrPizza.

Not sure what Peter has to do with the conversation, though much like Derek Smart or Beetlejuice, if you say his name three times on a web forum he will appear and begin to cause mischief.

sr105 wrote:

Does that mean that setting a boot/firmware password on my rMBP is just as good as enabling FileVault2?

That's a good question, and I don't know the answer. It depends on if the firmware password is just an EFI thing, or if it's actually the ATA password from the disk. I suspect that it isn't, and that you actually need a computer that boots BIOS to catch the Sandforce ATA password, but I don't know. You might fire off a note to the LSI/Sandforce folks and ask--they're pretty responsive to the e-mail addresses on their contact page.

atfp wrote:

Question about whole-disk encryption like BitLocker - does using that mean that if I lose or somehow mis-record my password, I will forever lose access to ALL of my personal data, including external backups?

You wouldn't lose access to your external backups--they're not affected by whole disk encryption (in fact, I believe Windows 7 warns you if you copy data from an encrypted disk to an unencrypted disk or network location). But, yes, if you lose your BitLocker key you might be in trouble. However, that isn't the end of the world for your data, if you're properly prepared; when you encrypt your drive with Bitlocker (and FileVault 2, for that matter), you're given a recovery key that you can use if you lose your password. With bitlocker, you can keep the key on a USB stick, or store it as a plain text file somewhere safe, or even keep it in Active Directory if your Bitlocker-enabled laptop is part of a Windows domain.

EDIT: That Nomad Jukebox brought back some memories! I never owned one, but I did have a Diamond Rio 500, which was SO COOL!

Heh, young'en. I remember my brother and I getting the Diamond Rio 300 at Christmas when they were brand new. The parallel port dongle/connector, saving up $100 to buy a 32mb SD card, and still having that stupid battery door clip break about a year after I bought it.

I think it was against the rules for them to give you CD ripping software with the thing, but I could be wrong on that front.

You don't have to like Apple or Apple products, but denying their influence is like denying climate change or a spherical earth.

The cool kids had SSDs long before the masses... by the time Apple got around to it, it was already pretty standard tech... in fact, TRIM had already been implemented by everyone before Apple got around to it. I guess we should be happy that Apple invented SSDs and TRIM, is what you're saying...

BTW, here's something else... solid state persistent storage had been in use for decades before the consumer market ever got their hands on them. As with a whole lot of things, tech trickles down as the price decreases. The consumer market is all about 'when the price is right'.

The cool kids had SSDs long before the masses... by the time Apple got around to it, it was already pretty standard tech... in fact, TRIM had already been implemented by everyone before Apple got around to it. I guess we should be happy that Apple invented SSDs and TRIM, is what you're saying...

That was meant as a reply to hobgoblin's comments on netbooks v. ultrabooks and "Gah, on top of the netbook backhand the opening page holds a 'everything changed with iphone'." No need to lapse into hyperbole and sarcasm--I do indeed know that SSDs existed before they showed up in macbook airs.

Regarding using full-disk encryption with SSDs: I understand from the article that it may not have a very high performance impact, but what about its impact on the number of writes to the SSD / the SSD's longevity?

Hypothetical situation: you have some moderately longish video you've created and saved in the AVI container format, weighing in at say 500MB or so. After saving, you decide you want to edit all sorts of metadata on your video, so you pull up your favorite metadata editor, make some changes, and save it out again. Immediately afterward, you realize you made a typo in one of the metadata fields, so you go in and fix it and save the whole thing again, etc.

Now, my (possibly incorrect) understanding is that since you're only changing metadata, which is located in just one small part of the file, if said file is not encrypted then only the blocks / pages that have changed will need to be rewritten. However, if full-disk encryption is in use, then even small changes to the metadata of the file will result in the entire thing changing and needing to be rewritten. That is, each time you made a small change to the metadata, you would essentially be re-saving a whole 500MB file to your disk, which especially in the case of SSDs could be a very bad thing.

Am i fundamentally misunderstanding the way things work here? Or is it perhaps just not that big a deal in practice?

(Note: I have no experience creating video content, so perhaps my example sucks and goes against normal workflows that real people would use. However, the general concept I think is still worth addressing.)

Also regarding encryption -- is there any way to really check that by setting an ATA password you have a secure setup? Is SandForce controller + ATA password always going to give you hashed encryption keys that will be secure? It seems like a black box with no verification of whether the ATA password is actually securing the encryption key, or just acting as an ATA password for non-encrypted drives.